Alien Race Alliances

>>49494223
Try reading a book that isn't a game manual

SHODAN is the goddess of all aliens.

>>49494257
I have, but a lot of the sci fi I've read is human-centric.

Can you recommend any books?

>>49494334
Vernor Vinge does aliens about as well as anyone I've read.

If their ideology or behavior can be comprehended by us, then it's probably something that's come up in a story about humans (for example, the factions in Alpha Centauri).

>>49494223

Not federation, not even a real alliance. Humans and alien species can understand each other more or less but they have too much differences at the moment to work closely besides some science and diplomatic missions. Though they form this loosely connected blob of controlled space in the Galaxy that works together cause working against others risks war. And war when you have FTL ships is a really bad idea. No one wants to get a couple dozen blips on the radar one day that signify ships coming out of FTL at around 0.3c loaded up to the gills with antimatter.

So they dance around each other trying not to step on the toes that they are not even sure in the same place as the one they are trying to avoid.

And the Galaxy is full of mysteries, non-FTL species and just some generally strange things.

>>49494223

Your proposed alien alliance is literally the Covenant.

>>49494223
A populist from one of the races unified them under a military dictatorship and now they're a Space Banana Republic.

Make the alliance based on a single race that uplifted all the other member races.

It's not an alliance based on ideology, it's an alliance based on shared heritage:

>>49494223
Make them working in close, peaceful, wholehearted cooperation as a union of equals rather than one or two species dominating the rest.

>>49494223
The Federation isn't the only alliance in Star Trek. You have the Dominion, who use heavily genetically engineered subspecies for their core bureaucracy and military, with which they rule over a bunch of client species who are relatively autonomic. They're not even that set on their selfproclaimed status as gods, as long as you pay lip service.

There's also the Borg, obviously. They care so little about racial restrictions that every member is basically consider Borg by everyone in the universe.

And you had those facelift aliens from Insurrection, who are newcomers and just took over two lesser advanced races. They're everywhere in background roles, as the original dudes are just a handful of centuries old laiens artificially stretching their longevity. There's not enough of them to fill a village, but they are the guys with the cool ships.

It's my head canon that Voyager's Vidiians are not one race, but a bunch of races afflicted by the same disease. That's not official, but it explains why a bunch of space lepers is one of the most powerful forces in their area.

And that's just Star Trek and its humanoid species. There's also a lot of non-humanoid species, but they're generally too alien to even have an alliance with.

>>49494642
What are good alternate names for a religious conglomerate, by the way? The Covenant is taken obviously. What about the Ecclesiogracy? The Unity? I need a quick snappy name for my scary dogmatic aliens.

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>>49494490
This.

Really who cares, there's cases of almost every trope done well and done poorly, the point is to make it well done, and really you can come up with the most original idea in the world but it isn't worth dick if the execution is bad.

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>>49494888
The Resolute Congregation.

>>49494223
There's nothing wrong with ripping off the Covenant.

>>49494519
That's a good idea, but I had the central race working towards the belief that they can bring their universe's version of the "first ones" back to uplift the righteous and tear down the unworthy, so I feel like ideological unity would be central.

>>49494223
To be honest it's hard because short of brief democracy and religious indoctrination multiculturalism simply doesn't work.

>>49494223
Plutocracy.

You might have two eyes or six, ten limbs or none, and might breathe methane or butane, but money is the same for everyone.

>>49494223
whats the idealogy/belief like

>>49494223

Space hanseatic league.

Loose confederation of trading city states.

>>49498786
That's a neat idea. If you might, could you expand on the idea?

>>49494223
Don't have them mushed together as a "One species, one government" type of deal for starters.

starfleet

>>49494467
This,

Lose galactic councils are better than unified galactic federations any day of the week. Esp if the aliens that make them up are super diverse and only barely able to prevent galactic wars or deal with extra-galactic threats. Bonus points if some of the members are Elder god tier and only part of the council as a formality. Minus points if humans somehow in charge.

>>49498982
How do you mean?

>>49499130
To keep things simple when multiple sapient species are involved, usually you just get "this is the nation of humans. This is the nation of space dwarves. This is the nation of space pigs" rather than "This is the nation of Piggystan, who is one of the major nations of the space pigs. They team up with space USA and the space dwarf theocracy to form the Big Space Alliance. Piggico is very butthurt that Piggystan got in first and started stonewalling their entry into the official treaties, and The Big Pig Empire doesn't give half a shit about jolly cooperation and just fucks around with their unobtanium mining colonies."

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>>49494334

David Brin's Uplift Series is pretty much entirely about intergalactic politics. His flavor of aliens operate on huge timescales, but ultimately prize ecological conservationism and the creation (or "Uplift") of pre-sapient species into full spacefaring civilizations. Everything else kind of sprawls out from that.

There's a lot of back-handed politics, thuggish bids to "protect" weaker species, and secret wars going on, but generally everybody gets along well enough that if they meet in public nobody's going to get zapped. The civilization is predicated on a collection of inter-special (and nominally "neutral") agencies, which collect data and resolve disputes.

One thing, for instance, that I thought was really cool about the setting is how every ship is required to have a permanent recorder onboard, hooked up to the ships systems and sensor arrays. This records everything from boring sensor-readings in deep space to extremely sensitive war-time meetings, but everybody agrees to have it on, and they agree to hand them over to the organization, where they remain locked away for 300 years before becoming public (at which point they are presumably no longer sensitive information). The result is a massive library of information gathered from every known spacefaring civilization, ideally to be used for the betterment of all sapient beings.

That kind of trust in The System is what keeps the galaxy from tearing itself apart, and the ability to manipulate or corrupt parts of that System is how power plays are made. The books are good reading.

Also they have intelligent space-dolphins in spider-mechs.

>>49494223
>I don't understand what alliances are

>>49494888

The Reconciliation
The Concordance
The Congruity
The Accession
The Instrumentality of Divinity

>>49499067

That was something Babylon 5 did very well. Humans are a power but they're not nearly the biggest power. As demonstrated by the near miss genocide attempt by the Minbari.

There's a great scene where Sinclair talks about how Earth is nowhere near prepared for a conflict with the Centauri, the Minbari, "Or god help us, the Vorlons".

>>49499326
Are you being a simpleton on purpose?

>>49499332
Sheridan, and good point.

Earth is powerful, sure, but they're at the bottom of the "great powers" on the council, arguably on tier with the Narn. And partly because even if some of the League of Non-Aligned Worlds are actually technologically superior, culturally they're not as given expansion or imperialism.

>>49499332
I'm not really familiar with B5, but isn't it still a human centric show? I'm thinking more like humans are just one of many insignificant council races.
I'm not sure if the galactic council from Iain M Banks Culture universe is a good example, since the books are about the Culture. (Although you could argue that the culture is a machine race and that it's human members are insignificant pets) But I like how the books hint at the greater galactic community.

The council mostly exists to prevent people from interfering with the development of primitive civilizations, or disturbing the various ascended civilizations and elder races that litter the galaxy with their incomprehensible artifacts. They are more or less ineffective when it comes to things like preventing the Idran culture war, enforcing arms limitations treaties between post scarcity civilizations who can 3d print entire war fleets in a matter of hours, or stopping the culture from doing sneaky shit, but they have a nice set of universally respected traditions and codes of conduct, without which the galaxy would be a much nastier place. Also they help coordinate response to things like hege swarm outbreaks and making sure the space kids stay off old man C'thon's space lawn.

It would be nice to see more games/stories about people working for that kind of quasi-organization.

Could a campaign with characters of vastly different power levels work? It might be interesting to play an open ended political campaign where the players are all members of different races working together to maintain relative order in the galaxy.

>>49499718

Yes and no. Yes because it's set on a space station built by humans and humans form most of its cast. No because it's stated quite explicitly that while most people find the humans interesting, and they're certainly an active power, they're still as mentioned above, >>49499683 a low tier power.

Also, it's stated that humans are one of the up and comers, and will be one of the great powers of the galaxy. Where several of the other powers are said, equally as explicitly, to be in decline. So that's probably a maybe.

TL;DR: by Star Trek standards no. By Culture or other sci-fi standards, maybe.

>>49499957
That's not that bad, but it's also not hard to be better than Trek in that regard. Humans are presumptuous little twats in star trek.

>>49500124

Yeah, Babylon 5 was a really ambitious but intensely flawed show. I love it, but YMMV.

Another one might be Farscape. There's only one actual human in the main cast, Peacekeepers notwithstanding. It's mostly about desperate people trying to survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Rw9Kru3Pc

This is an early season 1 episode, but it's probably the closest to what the show eventually becomes about without requiring much backstory beyond the into, and if you can get past the puppetry and the general lack of polish it's worth checking out in its entirety.

>>49500235
Looks pretty interesting, rubber foreheads nonwithstanding. Bio-sips and space politics are always cool.

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>>49496014
The Covenant themselves are pretty much the Idirans. They even have Halos.

>>49494924

Oh no don't get me wrong. A Covenant style alien alliance us totally a cool idea.

I just found it amusing OP said he wanted something different than the Covenant, and them went on to describe a homebrewed alien alliance exactly like them.

>>49494888
The Sharing
The Accord
The Real
The Universal Sonata
The Unbroken Causal Link
Children of Carbon, Children of Water
Soul and Energy Unpersihable

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To make it different throw out the ideology thing altogether.

Make it an alliance of necessity. It may be a flawed and shaky alliance but only by begrudgingly sharing resources and watching each other's backs do they stand a chance against the enriching dark.

>>49502081
*enroaching

though I'm sure there is a /pol/ joke in there now

>>49494223
Make them non-carbon based

Humans are horrific meat creatures to them, monster out of their sacred texts

This isn't HFY either, I mean their rational response is to hate, fear, and exterminate them

>>49494223
>>49494888

get Stellaris.

Play a match with completly RNG races and traits

Turn the shit that happened into a setting.

>>49502368
RNG?

>>49494223
idk about your premise,

I like the idea of a barely held together conglomerate of alien species that basically align because the interests of the ruling parties of each race align. So race X and Y and Z all work together like the UN, but ultimately X are the Jews (israel), Y is like Saudi Arabia, and Z is like Russia, etc. And the whole thing is run by race W, the Jews (USA).

But then within that you have races/governments who barely control their own people. And separately you have sub-groups within those confederate races who have their own interests.

That way you get to have little conspiracies and shit going on.

Covenant has religion/subjugation, Tau has Ideology/subjugation. In this system you have a bunch of groups working in concert because they each gain something out of it, but each of those individual groups might have slightly different motives and within that some of the sub groups work with/against other races. Some might want to overthrow the gov., some might want independence, some might want permits for a mining operation. It gives you a lot of wiggle room when you have a vaguely shaky alliance. And a group that's so unstable that it's basically at each others' throats and also working together for a purpose beyond a clear dislike of one another is very scary, because it means that the thing in their crosshairs is such a threat/piece of shit in their eyes that they prioritize it.

Imagine walking outside of a bar and there are two people who were just arguing and about to fight and then when you walk out they look at you and say "and who the fuck are you."

>>49502199

The problem with that non-carbon life is probably going to be rare (there is a fuck ton of carbon hydrogen and oxygen kicking around the cosmos), and definitely going to exist in an environment that is sudden death for carbon based life & vice versa.

You'd probably need to flesh out the why of it. Because there's a reason our religious texts are very big on what you can eat, fuck, and kill but kind of light on biochemistry.

Maybe they're a sulfur species and someone contaminates their planet with aerobic bacteria, and before they know it, their atmosphere has toxic concentrations of oxygen. Some inciting incident that gets their gamete exchange structures in a state that denotes readiness to distribute gametes for killing carbon based life.

>>49502081
>>49502097

>enriching
>enroaching

Okay, now you're doing it on purpose.

>>49502484

Stands for "Random Number Generator". He's saying to randomly generate the races and traits.

>>49501949
Idirans?

>>49501950
To be fair it sounds more like Babylon 5 than the Covenant.

>>49502368
>>49502484
>>49502628
speaking of stellaris they have their own multi racial alliance called the first league that was started when they came together because of the are good at certain things
they initial members were
Rodents who were good at diplomacy because of how their society was structured
Lizard people who had set up a large interstellar trade network
Bird people who had very advanced technology.
coming together they created the first league for mutual peace prosperity sharing science and defense bringing in a number of client races.
Things went pretty well until a race of intesctoid warrior showed up and began multiple incursion of the leagues member states until they were stopped but the insects were allowed to join the league and became happy to be a part of it when they brought in a lot of military might and enjoyed the benefits of memebership
The league had an impressive amount of projects they did together such as the league grand navy joint research and prison complexes created sanctuaries for pre FTL people and managed to created a city planet as the central hub for administration.

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>>49504067
From the Culture series. The Idirans are an enemy of the Culture, and are as powerful as the Culture.

They are a race of 3 meter tall tripod crustaceans. They are dual hermaphrodites, each half of a pairing impregnating the other. After pregnancy, their genitals fall off and they metamorphosize into their warrior stage. The Idirans are biologically immortal, and can survive massive trauma such as losing a large section of their head.

Their society is one of religious conquest. They have taken over many other races, like the Medjel. Races that resist them are destroyed, like the Fanch.

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>>49502081
>>49502097
>>49502586

Something about how strong they are against the cold, black cumming night?

>>49494223
Look to nature. Mutualism, parasitism, endosymbionts. Extrapolate on these concepts.

We would never truly "understand" an alien's psyche the way we can with other humans. At most, we can infer purpose and intent. So our relationship with them will be at the most basic level, similar to how different species of plants, microbes or animals react with each other.

>>49494393

Not OP, but I am always interested in some well done fictional aliens. What by Vernor Vinge would you recommend in specific to someone unfamiliar with his work?

I like the way that it was handled in The Journeyman Project games. There's a pre-existing alien UN called the Symbiotry of Peaceful Worlds that seem pretty cool and want us to join, but most aliens are so much more advanced than us and their culture is so hard to understand that a lot of humans think it's a bad idea, citing all the examples of times that less-advanced humans made treaties with industrial powers.

>>49505392
This guys sounds like he has some good points
Mutual benefit is the best way to hold together an alliance league coalition confederation federation
So ask yourself this
What benefit is there to being part of it

>>49504240
They WERE roughly as powerful as the culture before the war, which they lost.

After that the Culture proceed to get more powerful and continued to do cheeky shit behind the back of the galactic council.

>Violating arms limitation treaties
>Interfering with the development of primitive races
>Starting race wars by "Mistake"
>Inserting triple agents into a virtual war over the legality of virtual hell simulations which they agreed to stay out of
>Violating even more arms limitation treaties, seriously why does the galactic council think these will be effective in a galaxy full of post scarcity civilizations?
>Rudely interrupting an allied civilization's Apocalypse parties out of a misguided desire to "Uncover" a "Secret" that pretty much everyone already knew. Killing thousands of innocent people before they had a chance to upload their minds into hyperspace nirvana.

The Idrans by comparison were only committing space genocide.

>>49505514
I like that name, "symbiotry"

>>49499332
>>49499683
>>49499957
B5 definitely has one of the best portrayals of humans in scifi. We aren't the strongest, even by the end of the series. The Earth Alliance is full of issues like corruption, reckless ambition, alien infiltration, Orwellian conspiracies, and a massive inferiority complex that fuels it.

Even the most accomplished humans in the show work their wonders through working with aliens that do most of the work. Like the human contribution to the Shadow War was pretty small: some Rangers and starfuries.

>>49494467
This makes sense of the alien races are very diverse.

If the aliens are less diverse, like in Mass Effect, where most of the conflicts are due to culture rather than biology, closer federations are fine

>>49505694
For it to actually be an alliance at all by definition there needs to be some kind of mutual benefit. If you've come up with an alliance and there's no apparent reason for the members to be allies and to remain allies you're fucking up at the most basic level.

There's many different kinds of alliances that serve different military, economic or political purposes and the degree to which the different members contribute to them varies, but they always have some kind of value to their members.

>>49508051
and what benefits the they specifically provide or whether its singular can determine whether members will want in or not.
if its economic but everyone's economy is doing well already why join for benefits if you don't need them

>>49505392
Good points on alien psyche. Makes it hard to really write truly alien aliens.